How to make Ibeacon device can detect other devices

Question

I've got several pieces of Ibeacon signal sender from online sellers(all small business, no brand), they're quite cheap and small, and can support configuration by my IPad mini, which include the 'device name', 'Proximity UUID', 'Broadcasting interval' and etc. Now it even works in my android phone:

My question is: Is that possible to make these Ibeacon devices to detect other BLE4.0 devices around and send out the data? because as I understood, Ibeacon itself is a full BLE4.0 support device, seems like people removed some basic functions by some purpose.

My purpose is to embedded these ibeacon devices in my ARDUINO board, by connected their serial port, it works not only a Ibeacon sender, but also can detect other BLE4.0 devices around and send their advertising data to ARDUINO board to further process.

Answer 1

Radius Networks published a tutorial and howto on how to make a Raspberry Pi iBeacon transmitter also scan for other iBeacons and report their identifiers to the system to turn a lamp on and off. While this is on a different platform, it closely matches what you describe and probably has concepts helpful for an Arduino implementation.

Full disclosure: I am Chief Engineer at Radius Networks.

Answer 2

iBeacon is just a particular implementation of a BLE advertisement. Its purpose is simply to advertise the UUID, major and minor numbers.

As you say, these devices are built around BLE 4.0 chipsets and many do implement other BLE peripheral services for configuration. There is nothing stopping you from creating custom firmware for the device to communicate with something like an Arduino, but the ability to do it on any given piece of hardware will depend on what chip they are using and your ability to attach to the device to upload new firmware and access appropriate pins for communication with your Arduino using a serial port or SPI.